‘Truth is the only God I have ever adored,’ he tells us:  and we now know how truthful he was in saying so.  I have only summarised in this article the most important confirmations of his exact accuracy in facts and dates; the number could be extended indefinitely.  In the manuscripts we find innumerable further confirmations; and their chief value as testimony is that they tell us nothing which we should not have already known, if we had merely taken Casanova at his word.  But it is not always easy to take people at their own word, when they are writing about themselves; and the world has been very loth to believe in Casanova as he represents himself.  It has been specially loth to believe that he is telling the truth when he tells us about his adventures with women.  But the letters contained among these manuscripts shows us the women of Casanova writing to him with all the fervour and all the fidelity which he attributes to them; and they show him to us in the character of as fervid and faithful a lover.  In every fact, every detail, and in the whole mental impression which they convey, these manuscripts bring before us the Casanova of the Memoirs.  As I seemed to come upon Casanova at home, it was as if I came upon old friend, already perfectly known to me, before I had made my pilgrimage to Dux.

1902

TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE

A series of adventures wilder and more fantastic than the wildest of romances, written down with the exactitude of a business diary; a view of men and cities from Naples to Berlin, from Madrid and London to Constantinople and St. Petersburg; the ‘vie intime’ of the eighteenth century depicted by a man, who to-day sat with cardinals and saluted crowned heads, and to morrow lurked in dens of profligacy and crime; a book of confessions penned without reticence and without penitence; a record of forty years of “occult” charlatanism; a collection of tales of successful imposture, of ‘bonnes fortunes’, of marvellous escapes, of transcendent audacity, told with the humour of Smollett and the delicate wit of Voltaire.  Who is there interested in men and letters, and in the life of the past, who would not cry, “Where can such a book as this be found?”

Yet the above catalogue is but a brief outline, a bare and meagre summary, of the book known as “The memoirs of Casanova”; a work absolutely unique in literature.  He who opens these wonderful pages is as one who sits in a theatre and looks across the gloom, not on a stage-play, but on another and a vanished world.  The curtain draws up, and suddenly a hundred and fifty years are rolled away, and in bright light stands out before us the whole life of the past; the gay dresses, the polished wit, the careless morals, and all the revel and dancing of those merry years before the mighty deluge of the Revolution.  The palaces and marble stairs of old Venice are no longer desolate, but thronged with